All posts tagged Turkey

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has opened a new front in the country’s bitter cultural debate just three months after he successfully weathered a month of anti-government nationwide protests: student accommodation.

In a speech to lawmakers from his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, on Tuesday, the prime minister declared that he had taken measures to ensure male and female university students could no longer live in mixed-sex accommodation of any form because it is against Turkish values.

In televised comments, Mr. Erdogan said that his government “was responsible for everybody’s children” and that regional governors would act on intelligence from Turkey’s security services to ensure students were no longer placed in mixed dormitories or private houses. Read More »

GODOLLO, Hungary–Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary–which make up the group of countries known as the Visegrad4–said Thursday they strongly support including western Balkan countries in the European Union to ensure stability in a region that is often torn apart by war and ethnic conflict.

“Some may say the train [of EU enlargement] is moving too fast or some may say it’s moving too slow but the main thing for the V4 is that the train is moving,” said Hungarian foreign minister Janos Martonyi, who hosted the event.

The V4 said EU enlargement is able to stabilize and transform the region for the benefit of all its partners while cautioning that membership should be conditional on the individual performance of those wishing to join.

Thursday’s meeting, which was also attended by high-level government representatives from Italy, Turkey, and Austria, was mainly intended to lend support to the Western Balkan countries of Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina in their efforts to accede to the EU, and to discuss further cooperation among some of the countries present in energy, infrastructure and culture.

Croatia became the EU’s most recent new member when it joined on July 1, taking the total to 28.

EU enlargement “is far from being on an autopilot. Brussels needs to seriously take into consideration concerns of the citizens of the EU,” said Stefan Fule, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, who was also present at the meeting the. Read More »

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled his government’s so-called ‘Democratization package’ on Monday, a long-awaited slate of proposals for reform, which he labeled a “historic” step towards democracy but opposition lawmakers said amounted to electioneering.

The package was launched as part of the peace talks going on since late last year between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and the Turkish government. The PKK waged a war against the Turkish state in 1984 for Kurdish independence in a campaign which has cost the lives of some 40,000 people. The party now campaigns for autonomy in Turkey’s pro-Kurdish southeastern provinces. It declared a ceasefire after the start of the talks and has withdrawn some of its militants from Turkish soil.

Turkey may just be the most eager finalist vying to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, with the country’s top officials rushing to Buenos Aires to support their fifth and strongest bid to become the first Muslim host of the games.

Competing with Turkey’s bustling metropolis, Istanbul, are Tokyo and Madrid. All three candidates have been repeatedly knocking on the International Olympic Committee’s door in vain for the past few years.

Turkey has previously failed in its push to host the games in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. Of its rivals, Spain is bidding for a third straight time since Barcelona hosted the Olympics in 1992, and Japan, which saw the games come to Tokyo in 1964, is pushing for a second time in as many rounds. Read More »

Coming from Noam Chomsky, the following sentences may look as if the famed American linguist was seeking to develop a new syntax: “While there have been tampered with, sometimes with the Republic of Turkey won democracy. It ruled democratic elections.”

Except they didn’t belong to Mr. Chomsky, but to an imaginative Turkish newspaper, while the quotes appear to have been translated into English using Google’s translation tool.

On August 27, Turkish daily Yeni Safak, or New Dawn, published a front page article headlined–“The Arab Spring Has Now Found Its True Spirit”–which it claimed was based on an e-mailed exchange with Mr. Chomsky. The interview, which was conducted in English and centered on the crisis in Egypt, had taken place two weeks previously, the story said.

According to Yeni Safak, the renowned antiwar activist spent a considerable part of the exchange defending policies parallel to those of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The newspaper also cited several answers by the world’s most famous linguistics professor in unintelligible English.

“This complexity in the Middle East, do you think the Western states flapping because of this chaos? Contrary to what happens when everything that milk port, enters the work order, then begins to bustle in the West. I’ve seen the plans works,” Mr. Chomsky allegedly said in an answer to one question.

The text, however, flows perfectly in Turkish. Plugging the Turkish content into Google Translate shows that Mr. Chomsky was left uttering phrases like “milk port”–a direct translation of an idiom derived from sailing that means “calm.”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Chomsky denies uttering these nonsensical sentences: “I received quite a few letters, including some from friends, informing me that an interview had appeared containing statements I could not possibly have made,” the professor told The Wall Street Journal in an e-mail. “Some friends suggested that I respond with a brief comment, including the text of the actual interview. After doing that I left the matter to friends and Turkish journalists.” Read More »

Mass anti-government demonstrations dominated the headlines in Turkey this summer. Now one woman is walking across the country to draw attention to a change of the law she thinks the country’s democracy needs.

Aylin Kotil, 43, hit the road last week to walk the 280 miles from Istanbul to the capital, Ankara, demanding that Turkey’s electoral threshold be lowered from the current 10% to 5% at most in parliamentary elections, which would give smaller parties a presence in parliament and possibly reduce the AK Party’s dominance.

On Tuesday, she tweeted to her followers that she had passed the halfway point, accompanied by her support team.

“I am planning to reach Ankara on Sunday, July 28. The next day I will hand my manifesto to the representatives of each party in parliament,” Ms. Kotil said over the phone from a roadside on Tuesday during a break in her journey.

Since Ms. Kotil started walking on July 8, the number of her followers on Twitter has dramatically increased from 2,500 to nearly 19,000.

“Even truck drivers and passers-by have expressed so much support for me that I can’t help but wonder: If so many citizens have wanted the threshold down all along, why hasn’t anybody done or said anything about it?” Ms. Kotil said.

Ms. Kotil is a member of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, which recently proposed a bill to reduce the threshold from 10% to 3%. The party currently enjoys the support of some 22% of voters, according to a poll by Turkish research company Konsensus conducted in June. Read More »

Turkey’s nationwide protests, which grabbed headlines with images of police violence and protesters’ creativity, have produced the oddest of icons. The most recent addition is no exception.

As the sun was setting on Monday, Standing Man appeared on Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square, the epicenter of anti-government protests that have roiled Turkey since May 31. With security forces keeping a tight watch over Taksim, 34-year-old performance artist Erdem Gunduz walked to the middle of the square, stuck his hands in the pockets of his gray pants, and assumed a stoic stance that lasted about eight hours.

Within a short period of time, he was the hottest thing on Twitter–not only in Turkey, but for a brief period also worldwide.

Riot police had fired copious amounts of teargas to clear and secure the area over the weekend, seeking to bring an end to protests that started in adjacent Gezi Park and spread across the country after the police’s heavy-handed response turned an environmental sit-in into massive demonstrations.

Still shell-shocked from two days of fierce clashes with the police, and looking for a peaceful way to extend the protests in their third week, people started arriving at Taksim Square to join Mr. Gunduz.

Next, Standing Woman appeared at the Kizilay Square in Ankara, where a protester was fatally shot. And the passive resistance spread like wildfire, and even abroad to Paris and London. Read More »

But a recent poll suggests many Turks aren’t buying Mr. Erdogan’s democratic pledges, and are concerned about what they see as an increasingly authoritarian government.

Turkish research company MetroPOLL this week released the results of a poll conducted with nearly 3,000 citizens during the Gezi Park protests between June 3 and June 12.

The poll asked questions regarding the government’s style, freedom of expression, as well as about Gezi Park itself. The small green space in Istanbul became the epicenter of nationwide antigovernment demonstrations after a heavy police response to protesters who objected to plans to raze and develop the park.

The poll suggests that many Turks agree with some of the most basic grievances of the Gezi Park protesters, who initially were against the proposed development project and later turned the park protest into a broader stance against what they said was the Turkish government’s autocratic style. Read More »

Anyone following the rollercoaster ride of financial news over the past few years couldn’t have failed to notice the rise of Turkey: a fast-growing emerging market with strong banks which successfully dodged the worst of the global economic crisis. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based club of wealthy countries, paints a different picture.

In a new survey of 36 countries, the OECD has ranked the quality of life in Turkey at the bottom of the pile for the second year in a row.

The list, which ranks member countries on 11 factors including income, safety, life satisfaction and health, appears to show Turks are downright miserable in comparison with their OECD peers. Just 68% of people said they have more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, much lower than the average of 80%.

Analysts say a lack of education, unemployment, poverty and rapid migration are the main drivers of Turks’ dissatisfaction.

“I think Turkey’s social dynamics are different than European countries, our population is younger than of European countries, but migration from the rural areas to urban is very fast due to economic, social and security reasons,” said Ibrahim Balcioglu, professor at the psychiatry department of Cerrahpasa Medical Faculty. “Most of the young immigrants have problems, they don’t have enough professional education and have difficulties in adopting the city life style, which create ambiguity and tension in their lives.”

The OECD’s findings appear at odds with Turkey’s compelling growth story in recent years.

Since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, came to power in 2002, Turkey has seen a rise in per-capita income to $10,500 from $3,500 and economic growth averaging 5.5% a year.

In November 2012, Turkey secured its first investment-grade status since 1994 by Fitch Ratings. Moody’s Investors Service this month raised Turkey’s status by one notch to Baa3, the first step into investment grade, citing the country’s improving economy and public finances.

Despite those gains, the OECD findings suggest Turkey still has a long way to go. The Turkish labor market is still weaker than the OECD average. Only 48% of people aged 15 to 64 in Turkey have a paid job, much lower than the OECD employment average of 66%. Women are still less likely than men to participate in the labor market. In Turkey, 28% of women have jobs. This is much less than the OECD average of 60% and the 70% employment rate of men in Turkey, the survey said. Read More »

Pegasus Airlines Inc., scheduled to start publicly trading Friday, is Turkey’s leading budget airline. But the discount carrier offered no bargains for investors who scrambled to get a piece of its first share offering.

On Monday, Pegasus completed the biggest initial public offering of 2013 in Bourse Istanbul, listing 34.5% of its stock at 18.40 Turkish liras ($10.2) per share, said lead arranger Is Investment, a subsidiary of Turkey’s biggest bank by assets. The Istanbul-based carrier raised 650 million liras at the sale, which attracted twice as much in bids.

The significant investor demand for Pegasus came despite an implied price-to-earnings ratio of 14.6 times, almost double the earnings multiple of Turkish Airlines, the fastest-growing large carrier in the world. The P/E ratio is an indicator of the stock’s valuation versus the income the company generates.

Still, with an earnings multiple in line with global peers such as JetBlue Airways of the U.S., easyJet of the U.K. and Ryanair from Ireland, the budget carrier is poised to benefit investors on the back of robust increases in the number of air passengers in Turkey, analysts say. Read More »

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Emerging Europe Real Time provides sharp analysis and insight into what’s making news in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the expertise of our reporters in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey, the site provides an inside track on economics, politics and business in this emerging part of the European continent.